Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I have set the site feed to "Short" which means to read longer posts, you actually have to go to the blog, rather than the site feed. Basically I want to see how this affects my numbers, since I don't think there's a way to tell how many people are reading the site in their readers. I will probably restore regular full feeds after a week or so.

I know you said you'd "probably" restore full feeds in a week or so, but I just wanted to add my vote for definitely restoring them after this test run. I too am a Google Reader reader, and I prefer to catch up on your blog from there (I'll sometimes visit the actual blog to catch up on readers' comments within each post).

Thanks for keeping us in the loop about this test run, and many thanks for your always-helpful blog.

+1 for restoring full feeds as soon as possible. I don't generally click through. And as people say, if you want to get stats from web-based feedreaders, you can use Feedburner (which knows numbers because Google et al. report how many people they're fetching the feed for in the headers of their request to Feedburner).

I too totally recommend FeedBurner fro tracking your blog/reader traffic. I would of course like full posts in my reader but I don't think you're under any obligation to us. Content is king and if your great posts draw us into your page, well we'll be here.

I'm not out to sabotage you, dear Alex. You are running an experiment: What will people do if you "shorten" your feeds?

Well, I'm part of the answer: Some people will just make themselves a full feed in order to continue reading you.

So, from my PPV your character specific want is me to stop reading you. You will do whatever it takes to stop me. You already have restricted your feeds. You see me as a saboteur, as if I was out there to get you. The stakes get higher, you might even kill your feeds. Will you stop writing in order to stop me?

But then your global want is to write and be read. You can't stop writing, and your life is based on other people reading and enjoying what you write. So your character is self-contradictory, your specific want is working now against your global want.

No, I'm not running an experiment to see what people will do if I shorten my feeds. I am trying to find out how many people are reading my blog. By running an alt feed, you are sabotaging my effort.

Try to have a little respect for the guy who's putting the content up for free. If you want to read your own full feed, fine, but if you want full feeds restored, put your head towards helping me solve my problem.